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Monday, April 9, 2012

Robert Kelly MONOLOGUES FOR ORPHEUS A Dance Play

Robert Kelly

a dance play:

MONOLOGUES FOR ORPHEUS

Foresong:

Monologues – one voice at a time,
speaking – for Orpheus.For in several senses:texts for him to speak, saying his piece, his
mind, his excuses.But also texts for
him to hear—voices that come out of the wings from all sides, unseen speakers,
who reproach him, explain him to himself or to us, even praise him a little.He needs praise.He has lost his Eurydice.In Gluck’s great opera Orfeo, Orpheus sings
at the end, Che farò senza Euridice?What will I do without her?Which is also:what can I make without her?

What will any poet do without the
love he’s lost?But how did he lose
her?The myth talks about snakebite and
death’s dark palace and Orpheus singing his way down (lordy me, a poet can even
bore a dog to sleep) past snarling Cerberus, singing his complaint to King
Invisible, who lets him bring Eurydice back to the life world, provided…
what?That he not turn and look at her
on the road back.Or ever again?The invisible king of the underworld (Hades
means ‘unseen’) gives him an invisible wife.

But we who listen are not
Orpheus, or not yet.So we can still see
her.Imagine that as Orpheus speaks and
the voices chide him and comment, we see her silently dancing behind him,
around him, in and out of what we call —like innocent children— the visible
world.

Imagine then the silence of
Eurydice taking the form of a woman’s body dancing at her own speed, own whim,
own relationship to light and dark.She
is in a sense the only actor here, and the words might be an extension of her
movements, her meanings, just as they might be the texts the sermon of her body
means to explicate.

When you read these monologues,
you’ll see that there are no indications as to who is speaking any given
passage.That’s something we (and I
include myself, imputed author of these texts) have to figure out for ourselves,
on our way to becoming Orpheus.Or
beyond.

FOR THE PERFORMERS

Every time anyone says ‘I’ or
uses any first person singular pronoun, it is Orpheus speaking, and the actor
who is Orpheus must say those lines as far as they seem to carry the impulse of
that first-person saying…

Orpheus, who spoke it is said for
the gods, or for God, curiously disguised the source of what-is-being-said by
pretending that he himself was saying it.

This guise is the source of the
power and confusion of all poetry—it rouses without settling, illuminates
without being clear.At its best, it
brings the hearers to a resting place, a calm desert where they have never been
before.In their ears resound the
whining, boasting, wheedling, pleading, smug, delighted, innocent, corrupt
personality that calls itself “I”.But
already they know better.

So this Orpheus speaks.All round his lines are passages of text that
can be, must be, spoken by other voices. I do not think any of them are
Eurydice’s voice, though a few of them might be spoken by a woman who, in
sorrow or bitterness or rebuke, thinks for a moment of herself as Eurydice.

The rest of the voices are who
you are.The director will decide
howmany voices are needed, and will
assign to each voice the passages chosen for it to speak.

It seems to me that among these
texts are voices of scholars, psychiatrists, historians of life and art, young
men of no fixed persuasion, experienced urgent women, each saying what comes to
mind.I leave itto the director to find which actor best
embodies each text, both invoice and visual seeming.

And they must move or stand as
the director tells.What (I ask with
humility) I’d like is for the actors to do what their bodies want to do as
their voices speak the words.

One thing I do know is that
Eurydice herself is always present, always in motion –you decide, actor who
plays her, director who moves her, how and how fast she moves.She has no lines because traditionally and
ignorantly poetry construes the beloved as an object, out of earshot, a fantasy
of the poet’s wishing.This silent
figure recurs in all love poetry, even, it seems to me, in poetry written by
women.The ferne Geliebte, and she must be far off to be so vocally, wordily,
yearningly, gorgeously, loved.

So here I offer a tumult of
voices,some words for actors to speak,
finding their way in space and body to what poetry has aimed at for four
thousand years—the end of saying.

PROLOGUE IN THE THEATER

ORPHEUS was the poet, the
emblem of his art, not the first but for the Greeks the greatest. By the
power of his words in music, or the music in his words, or maybe his words as
music, he was able to make trees dance, they say,and boulders skip around in meadows.
The usual myth (and what other myth is worth the name but the myth
that everybody knows?) tells us that his wife, Eurydice, was bitten by a
snake and died. Orpheus went down to the Underworld to fetch her back,
and by the power of his song charmed (song as charm, magic spell, Latin carmen
= poem), charmed the beasts and bosses of Hell enough that they let Eurydice
return to life, up here, as long as Orpheus did not look at her as she followed
him uphill. Or ever again But he looked. And lost her. The
first opera ever composed (another lost art?) was about Orpheus, and the
greatest 18th century opera Mozart never wrote, was Gluck's Orfeo—

later, in the middle of the play,
you’ll hear a tenor sing the most famous line from it. And Rilke, purest
of poets, composed his final cycle to Orpheus, song singing to song. In
the play,I've tried to understand something about the dynamic of the man
and woman in the story.

[The first public performances
were done in the workshop context of a staged reading on 24th and 25th
February 2012, at Bard College, directed by Marjorie Folkman, who also moved as
Eurydice.The speaking roles were acted
by Thomas Bartscherer (Orpheus), Florian Becker (C), Lynn Behrendt (B), Mikhail
Horowitz (A), and Paul La Farge (D). On
that occasion, The prologue continued, adding what follows:

But first, to lead us in, we are to hear the
music of music, the one that leads, teaches, any other kind. David Adam
Nagy will play an allemande by Bach, human breath strumming the lyre, impossible,
the wood of the bassoon is the tree, dancing. Then Péter Laki will sing
three Hellenistic Songs by Adrienne Elisha, songs to textsfrom the last centuries of that Greek world
into which Orpheus, like Apollo, had come from the north. And finally we
go to the outskirts of hell, to hear the voices Orpheus sometimes hears, and
how he sometimes answers.]

—
R.K.

A.

TELL US ABOUT the part they leave
out—

what(or who)

is the snake that bit … or was it
killed. . .

or was it carried off Eurydice?

B.

For a poet, so much comes from
insecurity,

poetry is the song of insecurity,

litigious Shakespeare—poets own
everything—

as persons they’re not entitled to
anything, baseborn every one of them,

only by dint of their calling

they feel entitledto all.

C.

For poets, all times are the same
time,

so they are poor students of
causality,

they don’t know what comes after
what

A.

they “count, but not in numbers”

they speak, but too many words, too
many words.

C.

Keep talking…

A.

But still too many.

B.

Try to feel from his writing—what is
Orpheus. Or who?

A.

He had no son—that is of the
essence

of his story—no sons, a hundred

thousand daughters

C.

Orpheus? O[r]phis.
He is himself the snake that bit her foot

B.

Jealousy is not the truth of it—

fear and insecurity gnawed at him
he snapped at her, she died.

ORPHEUS

And of me, what shall be spoken?

Am I a dead man already?

That patch of sunlight

I keep studying on the grass,

is it under me or over me.

I know certain things—memory’s

make-believe, a crow calling

me to now.If this you hear

you’re living still.A crow.

Information of all kinds

from the realms around me

I have never entered.

I
have never been born—

B.

that is the poet’s ailment,

constantly picking up this leaf,

stone, touching that hand,

yearning for his own incarnation,

and who can give it to them?

ORPHEUS

Give it to me.

The women

are leaving me now

like the gods who shuffle away from
Antony

under the streets of the city

and I have no streets anymore.

They leave me, and that’s why

I stupidly reach out—

because all I know of life is
wanting her,

and now when she, the one,

moves away from me

I lose the clue to going on.

C.

He is not fond of these confessions—

that’s not what writing is for.

A.

He is always talking

as if talk had nothing to do

with all that music

they keep calling it,

‘lyric’ of the lyre, words

spun from tones,

tones primed by words,

C.

no one knows which comes first—

A.

in the museum there’s a marble
statue of him naked

playing a violin,

and the violin has no strings,

his lips are beautiful

no sound comes out—

B.

no song?word or tone?

Or none?

A.

He looks out over the summer lawn

quiet as stone.

B.

As if talk had nothing to do with
poetry

and poetry nothing to do with going
on.

C.

And while he’s pondering and
muttering

(hearing himself think, is what we
call it)

this voice-over murmurs its
commentary,

a nest of rabbis humming over the
book.

A.

Voice-over
they say in movies,

the voice you hear and think you
see.

C.

You cannot see the voice.

B.

You cannot see the voice and live.

A.

And while he stands there and does
what he does out loud

and voices fall from everywhere
around him

B.

Eurydice also is there.

Alive and silent

if silent people can be called alive.

Silent in this place and every
place she is

because he has never learned to
hear her.

But still she moves.

We see her dancing.

We see her move like someone waking
up

someone falling asleep someone
dying

someone waking up again—

A.

but all the while she dances

he thinks she’s dead

she’s behind him, she dances behind
him,

whatever’s behind us we think is
dead.

C.

He thinks the snake bit her and she
died.

He thinks the snake killed her.

A.

Orpheus sometimes thinks he was the
snake, he killed her with neglect, put other women before her, sang their
songs, put her behind him and she died.

It is his fault.

B.

Orpheus other times thinks he was
not at all the snake, the snake was someone else, a sly adulterer who carried
her off to his sleazy realm and made her forget him, made her put him behind
her.It must have been his fault.

C.

And other times Orpheus thinks
Eurydice was the snake herself, her own wandering ways took over, so she
wandered off, slithered away, and was gone, over the hill, beyond the forest,
across the sea, dead to him, dead with distance.

A.

He must have bored her with his
endless verbiage, word play, heart songs, or not held her tight enough, or held
too tight.His fault.

C.

Orpheus thinks all these things,
and can’t decide.

He can’t make up his mind.

B.

A poet can’t make up his mind—

the poem makes up his mind for him.

A.

Some say Eurydice killed herself.

Some say Orpheus killed her.

Some say she never died.

C.

A myth is what happens to the mind
— when it stops thinking.

ORPHEUS

The orderly wrongness
of being me

chided by
birdsong

early, the skreel

of night things
ever after—

the fault is mine

A.

he is the guilty
one,

the pointer out,
explainer,

child babbling in
the back seat

the names of all
the things they pass

B.

how irritating,
maddening really

that is, the
ceaseless chatter

of a mind trying
to confirm

its own existence by naming

all the things it
sees the things it wants

C.

how irritating
the ceaseless

commentary of
poetry.

ORPHEUS

No wonder
everybody loves me

and nobody really
loves what I speak.

B.

broadEury-

justice-dice

what shall we
make of her,

an honest
broad-faced wench

all too soon
promoted to alterity?

C.

it is so hard to
be somebody’s Other

A.

meantime in silly
urgency

he craves
Isthmia,

snake-hipped, virgin-harlot,
temple prostitute—

B.

But shouldn’t he
be the worshipper?

C.

Endless
confusions of Orpheus—

his mistakes interest
him, he

finds his
starting place

in whatever goes
wrong

A.

he makes us
listen ever after to what baffles him

happy, humming
them under our breath

B.

for it was breath

where it all
began

when it was any
good at all

A.

Some say art
smothers breath,

blinds the eyes,
stuffs the ears.

C.

If he thought it
into place

it stank like the
dead meat

of that turtle
whose shell

he lifted so
painfully off had

made the first
soundbox

for his lyre,
because meat

is what thinks

but breath is
what speaks

B.

Orpheus sneers at
the sophists:these men

(and it is mostly
men, isn’t it,

who do
philosophy, alas)

these men are
silenced by ideas

as adolescent
boys drown

all night in
visionary thinking

from which no
word can ever speak—

A.

What is vision?

seeing the unseen

ORPHEUS

This body will
not dance

they dance around
me

all around me,
all

the ones I
thought

thought I meant

but they return,
they

mean me now

and the dance
wills body—

o all these ones

are not theone…

[VOICE OFF,
SINGS:]

che farò senza Euridice?

ORPHEUS

She was the only
one

who brushed my
words aside

and smiled and
loved me

despite my music—

for her I was
what so

few poets dare to
be,

a human on earth,
stuck

here, glad to be,

thick with
breakfasts

working for a
living

and grumbling at
the weather,

nobody special,
hence genuine,

I was that one to
her,

without her I am
not that

to myself, and
come

to be like all
the other geniuses,

ridiculous and
noble,

a marble

statue to my own
identity…

A.

Writing is his mode of being.

C.

Slow opening of ancient files

police digging in the cellar

ORPHEUS

all
I am is a bone of what there was

B.

Mythology lets you talk about
yourself

unashamed, shamelessly even,

like Oedipus babbling in the woods—

ORPHEUS

Mythology

lets everybody know

the monster that I am

and what I’ve done

with this body of mine

she gave me

D.

—one last cry, “Mother!”—

I have heard that dying men call
out to their mothers—

but my mother told me the last word
she heard

her mother calling out was her
name, Maggie, Maggie,

and the street was full of
snow.And the doctor

was walking away.Maggie, for Margaret, from a Mediterranean

root meaning ‘pearl.’

B.

Everything comes from the sea—

the water that snakes its way from
the mountain springs

from the monsoon rains from the
clouds’ intimate rubbing on the hills,

snakes its way down and fills the
sea to its brim,

we are the brim,

the rim

we live on

ill-balanced between the elements

ORPHEUS

It’s when I feel you so close in
dream

that waking I most feel I’ve lost
you—

either feeling I could bear but the
both

together slay me.So I tied

a rope around your hips and drew
you

to me

there
was not slack left enough

to tie a knot, so instead you
looped

the rope over your wrists

held out to me;this I knotted loosely

and pulled you after me

from the dream.The stories say

I looked back and lost you –

nonsense:looking never lost the looked at.

What happened is I opened

my eyes on the hillside up from
dream

and lost you in the glare of common
daylight.

And when I close my eyes

I swear you still are there,

right here, I mean, between

all my past and that slim

knifeblade of a future, just

as you are in all my poetry.

D.

Orpheus is consoling himself.He picks up the sheaf of his recent work and
thumbs through it, looking for her.He’s
like an old rabbi busy at his pilpul, trying every dodge to find her,
Her, in every line.

Shakespeare put beautiful poems in
the unlikeliest mouths; character is his excuse for poetry.Orpheus, earlier, dared to